REVIEW: Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History by Margaret Juhae Lee

Reviewed by: Angela L. Eckhart

When asked to select a book from a list of available review copies, I chose this one based on the title for two reasons. I instantly pictured van Gogh’s painting, and I enjoy reading memoirs. But then the author’s name, Margaret Juhae Lee, seemed familiar.

When I discovered Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House; March 2024) was about the author’s grandfather during early twentieth-century Korea, I remembered meeting with Lee over Zoom in April 2020, in lieu of attending a conference which had been postponed because of the pandemic. During our online chat, she mentioned working on a memoir. Four years later, I finally had the opportunity to read it.

At first glance, the book contains a table of contents, a timeline, a family tree, and then a short preface. The substance of the memoir is divided into three parts, which are the three interviews with Halmoni. Within each part are titled essays about specific themes and can stand on their own, yet they also weave the entire story together. The timeline led me to believe I was about to embark on a 300-page history lesson; however, I was delighted to discover I was about to join Lee on her investigative journey while also learning more about her own private struggles.

Starry Field begins with a preface written like a fairy tale in third person. This narrative spotlights Lee’s feelings of not feeling at home—not belonging—in either country. Lee brings the tale full circle by finishing it at the end of her memoir, providing her readers with a satisfying and enlightening conclusion. Here is where the underlying theme is exposed: Lee’s quest to find out where she truly belongs.

Although Lee was born in the United States and raised in Houston, she never felt at home. Even after visiting her parents’ homeland, she still felt like an outsider, because she was an American, and she wasn’t used to certain Korean norms. Speaking English, and slowly learning some Korean, she visited Korea several times as a journalist to try and recover lost history about her paternal grandfather, Lee Chul Ha, a man believed to be a criminal who died in 1936.

Part of the reason Lee embarked on this investigative journey was at the suggestion of her mother. Lee’s father, Eun Sul Lee, knew nothing about Chul Ha, and Eun Sul Lee’s mother, Halmoni, refused to talk. Eun Sul Lee was born in 1934, only two years prior to Chul Ha’s death. He began his own research but had to stop when he fell ill. So, to learn more about Chul Ha—for her father’s sake as well as her own—Margaret Juhae Lee approached her grandmother as a journalist.

“Why do you want to know about painful things?” her grandmother had asked her. Lee responded that “it’s important for me to understand what happened in the past, to understand the history of our family so I can better understand myself.”

Through their interviews and Lee’s extensive document research in Korea, Lee provided her father with extraordinary knowledge about Chul Ha, a man he’d never remembered and only heard was a criminal. At the same time, Lee was exploring her own feelings and emotions. One of the characteristics of a good memoir is about being human and relating to others’ experiences. She accomplishes this by weaving her memories throughout her research, allowing the reader to get to know her more intimately.

I recognized some charming details about her younger years, such as wanting to watch Charlie’s Angels rather than listening to her parents discussing adult matters. I loved learning how she read so many books in her uncle’s expansive library in Korea—tomes I don’t think I would have been interested in at her age. Also, while living in Korea, she reads her father’s Time magazines. I am not surprised when she discovers pages ripped out for censorship, reminding me of my visit to Beijing and learning about the censorship there, as well. Again, she provides experiences to which readers can relate.

The memoir is written in both past and present, and I had to get used to some of the sentence structure. In the beginning, I had to read some sentences twice. What I thought were run-on sentences were merely continuations of her thoughts. For example, one paragraph began like this: “Reverberations in my solar plexus as the strobes shine pink and purple, as gravity disappears.” She was describing how she felt while dancing at a club with friends in college. Once I fell into the structure, the narrative flowed. Lee’s details and descriptions enhanced the narrative.

I feel glad for the author that she and her father finally heard stories and learned the truth about Halmoni’s and Chul Ha’s past; the truth that they had both been searching for. I was engrossed in reading Starry Field, but I think the subtitle, “A Memoir of Lost History,” could have been more enticing in the sense that the book was so much more. Perhaps something like, “A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Search for Her Grandfather and Herself.”

Prior to reading, I thought the memoir would be all about Lee Chul Ha and the conflict between Japan and Korea. However, Starry Field was interesting and insightful. It was about Lee’s search for her grandfather’s history, as well as a personal account of a girl yearning to find home.

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